


On Whom the Pale Moon Gleams

by embolalia



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Warning for death is only the Cylon kind of death, and of course all the people who die in canon, canon compliant AU, mention of past child abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-26 20:46:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 15,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1701977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embolalia/pseuds/embolalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the other side of the maelstrom, Kara wakes up to truths she never expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_We are the music-makers,_  
_And we are the dreamers of dreams,_  
_Wandering by lone sea-breakers,_  
_And sitting by desolate streams._  
_World-losers and world-forsakers,_  
_On whom the pale moon gleams:_  
_Yet we are the movers and shakers_  
_Of the world forever, it seems._

_\- Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy_

***

**Chapter One**

 

  
He hums softly as he waits for her to awaken. The music flows out of him; he hasn't felt this kind of joy in years.  
  
She gasps as her body comes to life: her chest heaves upward, her eyes open.  
  
The first thing she sees is him, and she smiles, filled with more peace than she's ever felt before.  
  
"Is this heaven?" she asks, eyes wide with awe.  
  
He laughs, and it's the same laugh she remembers.  
  
She reaches out to touch him, and sees her hand, and looks around, and starts to scream.

 

*

He holds her hand gently, waiting for her to awaken again. He had to sedate her the first time; she wouldn't stop thrashing and shrieking. She's coming out of it now, though, and he knows she can hear his voice.  
  
"I know it's strange," he says softly. He can remember very faintly the sense of color and motion that was all around him before he was him, before he was being born like she is now. He remembers, too, the shock of it: sensation and knowledge. A woman smiling at him whom he suddenly knew, a moment where he was pulled out of the stream and became a person. Her fingers seem to tense in his and he tries to explain, uses his voice to soothe her. "The first time I was born, I wasn't anywhere else first. Just part of the stream. Even when I opened my eyes, it was like I could feel time and space shifting around me and through me. But then my mother said my name and I had language, and I knew her, and I knew myself. She smiled at me, and I was...anchored, suddenly." He shakes his head. As many times as he's thought about this, he's never tried to put it into words.  
  
"I remember I looked around. The light seemed so bright and I didn't know what to look at. My brother and sister were across the room helping Sharon to be born. I stood for the first time, and Leoben took my hand to help me out of the tub. He touched me and the stream flooded through both of us for a second, and he laughed. I didn't understand until later that he had thought he was the only one who saw.  
  
"They took us, me and Sharon, dressed us and brought us into another room where the Centurions were waiting. I knew what they were, from memories my parents had created, but I also saw their past, their future." He frowns, remembering how he'd gasped, how Leoben had squeezed his hand to silence him. "They approved of us, and my mother was pleased.” He shakes his head. He knew her pleasure, could read it in her eyes, could feel it in the curve of his own face reflecting her emotions. Once he would hold a child in his arms, and see her smile, and know that same love.  
  
"Then Sharon and I met the others. There were thirteen of us, then. Thirteen left of the thirteenth tribe. The day we were born was the day they fulfilled the promise that ended the war. At the time I just knew everyone was happy.” His thumb caresses the backs of her fingers in his. He thinks of the other time she was born, of how perfect and small her hands were. The sound of his voice seems to be soothing her.  
  
"Leoben was the one who first took care of me, helped me to eat and sleep. He had been alive already for months and was so glad I shared his knowledge of the stream. He took me to see the hybrids. There were more of them, then. They showed me things even Leoben couldn't see. That was the first time I saw your face." He smiles fondly down at her. "I wanted to show the others how beautiful it all was. I was so young!" He laughs softly at himself.  
  
Her free hand is floating in the gel of the tank, creating ripples in the viscous fluid, circles spreading outward to lap at the sides. They reach the edge and fold back on themselves, constrained. He’s always been living this moment.  
  
"There was an image I had in my mind. Ripples. Rings. Leoben always talked about what we saw as the stream, so it was the only language I had. I had no better way of describing it. I tried to show them one day, cut my arm open and used the blood." He glances down at where the scar had been, on that first body. "My father Sam brought me paint. The others would come and watch me as I tried to express it. Even our parents didn't seem to understand completely what I was able to see, but Sam knew the most. He would sing to me sometimes, while I worked. Sharon and Sarah, when they were there, would join in." He smiles fondly. "Sam wasn't a programmer, hadn't had much to contribute, but he put that little piece into all of us." He wraps her hand between his two. Her skin is growing chilled. So is his heart, as memories pour forth from his lips.  
  
"John would come with the others sometimes, but he would always watch them, never me. He had dreams at night and woke, screaming in terror. I thought sometimes that he could see things too, in a different way. Once I woke him from a dream, tried to touch his hand and enter the stream with him, like with Leoben. John pushed me away, hit me." He winces. "I should have known then.  
  
"Our parents began to make more like us, as the Centurions had demanded. First John, then Leoben--they went in order. The volume of the technology was limited in those days. And then the Johns did something to the Centurions, to change them so they wouldn't demand things of us anymore. Our parents were angry, but no one wanted to change them back. They would have killed all of us, and then the humans."  
  
She's holding his hand tightly now, and he's not sure if she's waking up or just responding to his tension.  
  
"I didn't pay that much attention to what the others were doing; I was absorbed by my art. Ellen would still come and watch me for hours as I painted. The Johns were angry about that." He pauses, not sure how to describe the sudden agony, the darkness. "I barely remember the attack at all, but I remember waking up again. Back here, like you are. A second chance."  
  
He looks down at her and Kara's eyes are open. She's not panicking this time, but her eyes are scared.  
  
"Dad?" she breathes.  
  
Daniel smiles. "Kara. You remember me?"  
  
She starts to nod, then looks at their joined hands, and past them at the missing tattoo on her forearm, at the resurrection tub that she's laying in. "No!" she starts to protest, pulling away, but he hangs on.  
  
"Kara! Kara. It's alright. I'll explain. You're alive. It's alright!" He grabs her by the shoulders now, and pulls her up until she's standing, trembling with cold and shock.  
  
She gazes down at her feet through the murky gel, her eyes wide. "This is not alright," she growls through her teeth.  
  
He reaches for a towel, wraps it around her. "Come on," he coaxes. Forcing her to look up at him, Daniel helps her from the tub. She's poised as if for an attack, yet shivering at the same time. He tries to be gentle, uses another towel to dry her hair. It's as blond as he remembers.  
  
As he wipes the moisture from her cheek, Kara speaks again. "Dad?" She starts to shake her head in resistance.  
  
Daniel meets her eyes and can't help smiling. "I've missed you so much."  
  
"But..." She stops, swallows, looks away a moment, off into memory. He waits for her to process, catches the flashes of grief and horror that cross her face. "I can't be a Cylon,” she whispers, voice curdling.  
  
He hesitates. He knew it might come to this, leaving her with Socrata. But the joy in her eyes when she first opened them—he’ll make her understand, in time. "It's a long story."  
  
Kara looks up at him angrily. "I can’t be."  
  
Emotion leaps in his heart: pride and love, everything he’s waited to feel for his daughter. He can’t contain it. Nothing could ruin this moment. "Let's get you cleaned up and I'll explain."


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

The man who looks like her father helps Kara into a t-shirt and sweatpants; they’re his own and they hang on her, but her shivering stops. He won’t stop smiling; she keeps a wary eye on him at all times. It’s a dream, it has to be. Or the Cylons are doing something to her, tricking her. There’s no other explanation.  
  
"Here." He leaves the room for a minute and returns with an apple and a glass of water, presses them into her hands.  
  
Kara stares down at the food. Her eyes flicker up to him, evaluating carefully. She takes a bite. The juice is tart and flavorful. She can't help grinning; it's been so long since she ate anything not made of algae. Then again, she's not sure she's ever eaten before. That thought crowds out all others. The world barely makes sense. "Who are you?" she asks instead. This cannot be her father.  
  
"I've been called by different names. My mother called me Daniel." He must see the confusion in her eyes, because he nods gently toward the door. "Come sit." He leads her to a living area. Kara can still feel the terrifying presence of the tank in the distance.  
  
“Your story,” she demands. “What the frak—”  
  
He nods and she falls silent. “It’s strange to remember,” he says after a moment. “Sometimes it's hard to understand the things that happened to you when you were young."  
  
Kara frowns at him, at the understatement. "Yeah." She takes another bite, realizes she's hungry.  
  
Daniel gestures to the table and they sit as Kara eats quickly.  
  
“As far as who I am…” He shrugs. “I was born a Cylon, born as innocent as you were, and my mother held me in her arms. But the second time I woke up in one of those tanks, my mother wasn't calm at all. She was crying, and I'd never seen anyone cry like that before. She told me that John had come to her, told her there had been some kind of accident and I was dead. But when she found me I was only unconscious. She was crying because she had nearly killed me before she thought to check that the new copies of my body were ready. Somehow John had damaged them. The bodies were whole but the minds would never have worked. So she had put me back in the tub and hoped it would help." He smiles. "It worked, I guess. Healed me enough." The smile fades. "She told me she would show the others one of the bodies and say it was mine. But I would have to leave until they got John under control."  
  
"John Cavil," Kara says softly. The way his eyes dart to hers is confirmation. She can almost see the words as he speaks, has faint images in her mind of Daniel in a tank, feels the blurred presence of his mother.  
  
"Yes."  
  
"And what, they couldn't?"  
  
He shakes his head. "I don't know. My mother gave me one of the Centurions' ships. It had FTL capacity. She’d installed one of the units from the resurrection hub they were building, and the information I'd need to make a copy of a body from my own DNA if I needed to." Daniel grows sad at the memory of their parting. "She had kept journals and maps of their journey, and she gave me those, too. I think partly so John would never get them. She smiled when I left, and told me to have an adventure, and that she would see me again." He looks away from Kara. "But I never saw her again."  
  
Kara reaches out as if to take his hand again, then catches herself, frowning. She sits back, resumes her wary posture. "So your parents were the infamous Final Five?"  
  
Daniel laughs at the sobriquet. "I suppose so."  
  
"What, all of them?" She's skeptical, trying to fit the facts together in her mind. This is all some sort of trick. The twists of his expressions make her heart ache with a child’s longing, but the Cylons would know that, wouldn’t they? It all has to be a trick?  
  
"Well, not sexually. It's more complicated than that. I never knew how most of that worked, not like John. My mother Ellen did most of it, but they were all part of our creation."  
  
Kara snorts. "I knew an Ellen once."  
  
He nods, studying Kara.  
  
Her fingers tighten on the edge of the table, and when she pulls her hand back, there are flakes of rust on her fingertips. She rubs them together, studies the whirls of her fingerprints. Kara’s heart starts to race. "This is real," she says suddenly.  
  
"Yes." He watches her carefully.  
  
Her eyes jump to his, desperate. The last memory she has before coming here floods through her: the storm wrapped her up, and even as Lee screamed in her ear, she knew what she had to do. "Did you pull me out of the storm? Did you--did the Cylons get Galactica? Where's Lee? Are they--"  
  
"Kara," Daniel says, cutting her off. "I don't know. But if Cavil and the others found your friends, it wasn't because of me."  
  
She sits back, her arms crossed now, her old self returning. "So what, this is your adventure? Rescuing people from storms? Or is this just another Cylon mindfrak?”  
  
He shakes his head. "It’s just the two of us. You’re safe here. But my adventure is more complicated than that, I'm afraid."  
  
“Why should I believe anything you say?” she spits out.  
  
The man looks at her, and in her heart she feels a recognition she doesn’t want to believe. “When you were a child,” he says softly, “you loved to run in the sprinkler in the summer, chasing after the little puppy from next door. Mrs. Cadmere’s dog.”  
  
Caddy, it was called. A rush of tears fills her throat. No. It can’t be true. “So tell me about complicated.” She waits.  
  
“I’m not one of them anymore, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I haven’t seen them since—well, that’s not exactly right. But I’ll get to that.” He nods. "I missed them, of course, as I flew off, but I was still part of the stream; I could still feel my family around me."  
  
Kara glares unconsciously at the mention of the stream.  
  
"What?"  
  
She shakes her head. "You're certainly Leoben's brother."  
  
Daniel cocks his head. "What do you mean?"  
  
She rolls her eyes. "You first."  
  
"For a while I traced my parents' route in reverse. I found Kobol, and the ruins. I explored nebulae and black holes. In time I jumped all the way to Earth."  
  
"You found Earth? Where is it?" Kara demands.  
  
He nods, framing the story. "Those first five, the five who made us--they had come from Earth. They were the last of the thirteenth tribe."  
  
"That doesn't make sense," she snaps, rising to her feet in agitation. "There were no Cylons in the thirteenth tribe."  
  
"How do you know?" For the first time, he seems irritated.  
  
She shakes her head. "Because--" The worlds start to fall apart, again. "We’ve been heading toward a Cylon stronghold?"  
  
Daniel winces, regret in his eyes. "Earth is dead. The Cylons destroyed it just before the five left. That was why they went back to the colonies--they wanted to warn you not to make Cylons."  
  
"So we're heading toward nothing?" She doesn't want to believe him, but she does. Kara doesn't try to analyze why. Her jaw trembles.  
  
He answers gently. "Well, you can't live on Earth the way it is now. I certainly couldn't. But as I left, flying without any direction, I got sucked into something. A wormhole. And I emerged orbiting a planet, a gas giant." Daniel smiles now, shaking his head in awe. "I looked out at the planet and saw something that froze me. A storm, a pattern, a symbol that had followed me through the stream since before I was alive."  
  
Kara can feel herself shaking again as she stares at him and the meaning of her entire life reworks itself around her. "The mandala."  
  
"The what?"  
  
"The circles. Blue and yellow and red."  
  
He nods now, approving. "Yes. I saw it and I knew I had come all that way for something, for some purpose. But I didn't know what it was. I hung there in space over the clouds and waited for something to happen. And while I waited I painted, and sang, and tried to channel the stream through myself in every way I knew. And then one day, I played my father's song into the ship itself, as if its pre-sentient brain could understand. And it brought me here."  
  
"Here?" Kara's voice quavers.  
  
For the first time, her father grins. "Come on." Taking her by the hand even when she tries to jerk away, Daniel leads her quickly through corridors brilliant with murals Kara doesn't have time to study. After a few minutes they reach an airlock.  
  
"Hey!" Kara protests as he reaches to open it, and only then realizes she hasn't, in all this time, heard the humming of air purifiers or the purring of engines.  
  
The door opens, and for a moment Kara can't breathe. And then she starts to laugh. Raucously, joyfully. In two steps she's out of the ship, her feet bare in the grass as a gentle yellow sun warms her skin. "You did it!" she bursts out. She turns to Daniel and as he steps out beside her, she throws her arms around him.  
  
He hugs her in surprise.  
  
"This—we can live here! We can bring them all and they’ll be safe—”  
  
He raises his eyebrows. "I don't know. The stream hasn’t shown me—"  
  
Kara steps away from him quickly, self-consciously, and turns back to the planet before her, strides away across the field as she takes it all in. In the distance are apple trees, and beyond them are mountains. She can hardly contain the hope that pounds suddenly through her. For the first time in her whole life, Kara believes her destiny might be a good one. She whirls toward Daniel. "We have to go back. We have to bring them here. No matter what I am, or you, we have to tell--"  
  
He holds up his hands, stopping her. "Kara, wait. Let me tell you the rest first."  
  
"And then we go back," she insists, body tensed for a fight. She's never been clearer on what she has to do.  
  
Daniel nods once, to reassure her. "The story first."  
  
Kara lets out a slow breath. A story is hardly a bad trade for a planet. She sits down in the grass. "So talk."


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

Daniel settles himself on the edge of the hatch and begins again. Kara watches him this time with more faith, taking in the lines around his eyes and the flight of his hands with a thousand tiny shocks of recognition.  
  
"When I first found it, I thought that this planet was the answer to all our problems. My parents had convinced the Centurions to stop fighting the humans, but if we could give them a planet this far away, it seemed like my parents' fears of war would be settled. And John could have as much space as he wanted. So I went back.  
  
"Perhaps it was how young I was, but I thought that John would have grown up by then, would have changed. Or that my parents would have taught him better. I don't know exactly what I expected, but it wasn't what I found. I got back to where I'd left, but the Colony had moved. I couldn't find it. I couldn't even find my parents in the stream anymore. Leoben was there, but distant. I couldn't reach him the way I used to."  
  
Daniel pauses, shaking his head. "There's nothing quite so lonely as going home and finding it's gone."  
  
Kara nods, remembering the desolation of Caprica. "Yeah."  
  
He swallows. "I hid my ship in an asteroid field. I had technology on board--a device based on something my father had been working on while they traveled from Earth, a transporter that could move tylium ore from one point to another instantly. He'd been trying to recreate the FTL drives his people once had, and since I already knew how those worked I was able to get his transporter going. I used it to go down to Picon. I wasn't sure it would work, but I had made myself a back-up body, just in case."  
  
Kara snorts at the oddity of it, thinking of Sharon. Death as a learning experience. Then her eyes dart back to Daniel as she realizes suddenly where this is going. "You went to Picon."  
  
"I did. Twelve years had passed since the war ended, and I wasn't sure what I was going to find. I had seen some of the Centurions' memories of the colonies: their decadence, their injustice, their technology. What I found was incredibly different. No more virtual life, hardly any computers. Ships just sophisticated enough to get cargo from one planet to another, except for the Battlestars, and they'd been built to eliminate networking as much as possible."  
  
She smirks. "I know."  
  
"I explored on my own for a while, and then one day I wandered into a bar. There were some off-duty marines in there, throwing darts at a target shaped like a Centurion. One woman was especially vicious. I watched her for a long time." His careful gaze makes Kara conscious of the new tension in her shoulders, the way her teeth worry her lip. "She was very damaged, Kara. Fighting the Centurions had scarred her so badly even she didn't think she could return to who she was. But I could see her in the stream, both the way she was and the way she could have been, if not for them. And I loved her. I wanted to bring her back to herself. I had failed to show my people, to show John, the wonder of the stream, but if I could show her peace, show the humans, I thought maybe I could bring the worlds back together from the other direction."  
  
His voice is impassioned and Kara smiles, thinking of Lee. And then she bites her lips together, dreading the answer to her next question. "She never told me you met in a bar," she says softly. She doesn't even have the courage to ask it.  
  
Daniel's eyes fill with sorrow. "I wish I'd been there to tell you."  
  
Kara's heart races, her eyes locked on his. "I don't understand." She doesn't want to understand.  
  
"I began to play, in the bar. Music for her, music that came from my father and from everywhere I'd been. It was how I first got Socrata's attention." He grins. "And we fell in love. It was different than anything I'd ever felt. It was wonderful. And just as the other Cylons had responded to my art, the people responded to my music. By the end of the year your mother had been transferred and I had moved with her. People on Caprica wanted to hear my music, and I wanted to share it with them. And we got married."  
  
There are tears in her eyes and she's not sure why.  
  
"I never thought we could have a child."  
  
Kara's eyes clamp shut, and moisture tracks down her cheeks.  
  
"I knew, though, the moment you were conceived. I recognized you. I loved you."  
  
She looks at him, still crying, still voiceless. She watched her mother die again just hours ago but somehow seeing her this way is worse. Daniel rises, hesitantly, and sinks down beside Kara on the grass. "It's alright," he says again, reaching out for her with a tenderness that is so painfully familiar. And she lets him hold her, for the first time in twenty years. It's the other half of what she began in the maelstrom: understanding. Forgiveness.  
  
*  
  
The sun is dimming as Kara straightens and speaks again. "You left us." Her voice is thick with tears but her tone is accusatory.  
  
Daniel lets her pull away, but remains beside her. She doesn't stop him. "I had no choice. When I first got to the Colonies, and then to Caprica, I had hoped there might be some of my kind there, that I would find them eventually. In all those years, I never saw any sign that they still existed. And I was so happy with you and your mom. I remember the first time I let you play my piano." He smiles at her, and Kara finds herself returning the smile. "I played a few notes, and then you joined me. You played his song, your grandfather's song, as if you'd just written it yourself."  
  
Kara shakes her head, stubbornly ignoring a sudden chill passing over her. She laces her fingers through the grass as if the truths still in store will send her spinning free of this reality. "I don't remember that."  
  
He shrugs. "You were very young. But you took to it right away. To art, too. I remember showing you the symbol I had tried to paint, the symbol in the clouds. It was like you knew what it meant."  
  
She laughs, and looks at him with the same wonder she did that day.  
  
"I didn't think you could see the stream, not like I could, but I could see you in it. I knew you had to know about the storm. And I knew you would be important."  
  
Kara's eyes widen in understanding. "And you told Socrata." It's not a question.  
  
Daniel hesitates. "Later. When I knew I couldn't stay." His fingers begin to pluck at the grass, echoing Kara's. "I was playing one night, at the Helice Opera House in Caprica City. And afterward a man was waiting for me outside the building. Fans waited for me all the time, wanting autographs or just to say hello. I didn't think anything of it until he stepped into the light."  
  
"Cavil?" she asks quickly.  
  
He shakes his head. "Sam. My father."  
  
She raises her eyebrows in surprise. "What's wrong with that?"  
  
Daniel sighs with the pain of the memory. "He didn't know who I was. I ran to him, hugged him, and he didn't know me. But he didn't know himself, either. He thought he was human, thought he had been in the military for years. He was a little surprised when I hugged him but he told me he was a huge fan, that my music spoke to him. He had no idea it was his." Daniel’s hands tighten into fists. "I didn't know what it meant, but I knew something was wrong. My tour was supposed to move on to another city but I didn't want to leave him like that. I stayed another night there, got Sam to agree to have dinner with me. It was a mistake." He turns his face away. "John found us at Sam’s house. He killed Sam at once, and then came at me, furious that I was alive, demanding to know how I had survived. He was sure that I couldn't resurrect, so he didn't bother to conceal what he'd done. He said he'd wiped our parents' minds, was forcing them to live among the humans so they'd realize what a waste humanity was." Daniel snorts. "He complained, even, that he'd have to rewrite Sam's memories again.  
  
"I tried--tried to convince him that there was something beautiful in humanity, that I'd found love and it outshone anything we'd known, anything our parents could have programmed into us." His eyes meet Kara's. "That was what did it. He got so angry he killed me."  
  
She nods, her eyes worried.  
  
"I woke up alone, back on my ship, no one to help me with the awakening. And I knew I had to leave, that if I stayed you and your mother would be in danger, too."  
  
"You couldn't bring me with you?" Her voice is high-pitched, child-like.  
  
Daniel takes her hands in his. "I had seen pieces of your future in the stream. You were needed there. Destiny would not have let me take you."  
  
She shakes her head fiercely. "Destiny--"  
  
"Kara." His tone orders her to give him her eyes, and she does. "I had no choice. I knew that. I snuck back, praying that because Cavil didn't know I could resurrect he wouldn't think to look for my family, or that he'd believe like I had that we couldn't reproduce and wouldn't know you were mine if he found you. I stayed just long enough to say goodbye, to try to tell your mother how special you were, how she had to make sure you grew up ready for the things that would be asked of you." He sighs. "She wanted an explanation but I couldn't give her one. I couldn't tell her what I was--as much as I loved her, as much as I had healed her in those years, I don't think she would have understood."  
  
"She never did," Kara whispers.  
  
His eyes apologize, but his voice is firm. "You're here, where I always knew you would be. All the rest since that moment--I've spent all that time trying to get here. And so have you."  
  
*  
  
It’s grown dark, now, and Kara doesn't resist when her father pulls her to her feet and tugs her back toward the ship. She sighs softly when her feet leave the grass for the metal planking, but the craft is warmer and she finds she's hungry again.  
  
Daniel hears her stomach growl and leads Kara further into the ship. "Time for dinner." She tries to stop and look at the paintings this time, especially when she sees a figure of a child, but her hunger draws her on. They stop in the galley. The kitchen itself is make-shift, appliances welded into the walls of a room designed for another purpose. She wonders what it was before the final five stole it to make their escape. Daniel reaches into a cabinet and pulls out a jar. "Here you go."  
  
Kara unscrews the lid while he gathers other things and dips in a finger, tastes experimentally. Her eyes fall closed at the sweetness, the sudden memory of childhood treats. "Honey," she says in surprise. "We haven't had this in the fleet in years."  
  
Daniel grins. "Lots of things are easier to come by on a planet."  
  
"A planet with bees?" She shakes her head in doubt.  
  
"Not exactly." He lays out other food on the table: bread, more apples, some kind of dried meat.  
  
Kara begins to eat ravenously. "This is so much better than algae," she gets out between bites.  
  
He nods, eating his own share more slowly.  
  
"So, what?" she asks quickly, "just something like bees?"  
  
Daniel swallows and continues his story. "Actually, real bees. Bees are from Kobol, and my parents had brought them to Earth. My other mother, besides Ellen, was the one who knew about animal life, and in the data Ellen gave me were the genetic codes for most of the species that existed back there. The first time I found this planet, it had vegetation and some animal life, but not nearly as much as now. When I had to leave the colonies, I came back. I knew it would be a long time until I saw you again, and I was lonely. So I began to put the codes into the resurrection machine, to see what it could come up with. And it worked. I began to seed the planet with other animal life: bees and goats and dolphins...the animals of Kobol."  
  
"What, like you're one of the Gods?" Kara snaps, shocked at his presumption.  
  
He snorts. "Your mother gave you her religious notions?"  
  
"Hey!" Kara protests. "The Gods have done more for me than you ever—"  
  
He shakes his head. "We'll have to debate that later. Can I finish?"  
  
"Fine." She glares and goes back to her food.  
  
"It was lonely here, even with the animals, and eventually I decided to try to make people."  
  
Kara stops eating in startlement, but doesn't say anything.  
  
"Without Ellen's gift for programming, though, I could only generate bodies. My people came out...unformed. I've tried to give them language, to show them the stream. They make their own music now, and art." He smiles like a proud father. "They're learning. Creating their own knowledge. In the past few years, I've mostly just watched them develop."  
  
Her eyes are wary, almost horrified. "How is that different?" Kara demands. "Hasn't the creation of the cylons--twice!--taught us not to take creation into our own hands? Isn't that what your parents wanted to tell all of us?"  
  
Daniel blinks at her in surprise, but then he shakes his head. "I think--No. I remember. I remember from their own minds what my parents wanted us to learn, and it's more complicated than that. It's not the technology that's wrong, Kara, or the creation of sentience. It's keeping power over it. It's exactly what went wrong with John."  
  
"And so what if he finds this place? And makes your peaceful little human prototypes his slaves because he can?"  
  
He shakes his head again. "I've seen the stream, Kara. They will have a role to play too, in the future of humanity."  
  
She frowns at him. "That doesn't get you out of everything, you know. 'I've seen it.' Leoben tried to put that over on me, too, and it never turned out the way he wanted it."  
  
Daniel surprises her by smiling. "How is he? Leoben?"  
  
Kara glares. "Oh, he's just frakking great. Killed a few of him myself."  
  
For a moment Daniel studies her carefully and she wonders what he would make of her if he could see her the way she was before, with scars and tattoos and long-healed breaks.  
  
"What happened to you?" he asks softly.  
  
She shakes her head, laughter bubbling up at the ridiculousness of the question. "What, since I was six?"  
  
"Yes," he says firmly. "Tell me."


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

Kara clenches her teeth. A day ago--or however long it's been since she flew into the storm--there was no way she could have told this story. Even now the memories burn with shame, but she doesn’t consider not answering. She tries to make it quick, stares at her hands folded before her on the table while she speaks. "It was hard after you left. You were right; she didn't understand. She wanted me to be perfect, and when I wasn't she punished me. A lot. Worse when she was drinking... teachers asked if I was alright sometimes, and doctors, but it's not like I was going to tell them."  
  
"She hurt you."  
  
Kara looks up at Daniel's sudden fury. She remembers what she saw in the storm. "She thought it was what she had to do."  
  
Guilt suffuses his face. "Because of what I told her."  
  
She shakes her head once, tells the rest of the truth. "She was always damaged. Before you. After you." Her fingers rub at one another.  
  
He doesn't speak, tries to remember his Socrata, tries to imagine her hurting their daughter. Hears again the way Kara asked earlier, so desperately, why he couldn't bring her with him.  
  
"The physical stuff stopped when I got older," Kara continues. "I played Pyramid in high school, and I was good at it. It kept me out of the house most of the time." She bites her lips together and takes a slow breath. "I had to stop, though. One night I came home and she was screaming. She'd found birth control in my room. She started throwing things at me. Plates." She doesn't look up at him. "A shard of something caught me across the back of my knee, sliced right through a tendon. I couldn't play after that." Kara swallows hard, remembering the disappointment, the rage she'd felt at the time. Remembering her mother explaining to the EMTs that it had all been an accident.  
  
"I'm so sorry." His voice is strangled; his face, when she looks up, is dark with anger. This is how she'd once imagined Adama would react if she told him.  
  
She shrugs it away. "I joined the fleet as soon as I graduated, hoping I'd be stationed somewhere far away. I ended up at the Academy in Delphi, but it was far enough." Now Kara smiles; this is where her life got good. "That's where I first got to fly. It was the most amazing thing I'd ever felt, and I was good at it. Everyone knew it. I'd never been good enough for her, ever, but finally--when I was in my Viper, I was free." She grins with remembered joy, then grimaces at a sudden thought. "If I'm really part machine--is that all it was?" She looks at Daniel hard for a moment, then snorts. "Then again, if being a machine made you a good pilot, why'd Sharon crash her Raptor all those times?"  
  
In the middle of a nod, Daniel jerks to attention at the name. "Sharon?"  
  
"I met her later." Kara winces. "At the end of my time in flight school, that's when Mama died. I didn't miss her.” As she watches, a shadow crosses his face, his eyes falling closed in grief. Kara studies him in amazement. There was a woman she never knew, that woman he thought Socrata could become. For an aching moment Kara wishes she could have met that mother. Her father looks up, and nods for her to continue.  
  
“Anyway, then I got into some trouble with following rules my first year as a pilot, ended up back teaching at the Academy." She smiles faintly. It's odd to realize that of all the moments she could include in her life's story, this is one she can't leave out.  
  
"I met a boy there, Zak. And his brother. Zak was my student, but he was also the first person who ever really loved me." She meets Daniel's eyes and feels momentarily guilty. "Loved me, loved me. You know. And we were going to get married, but he died." She shakes her head when Daniel opens his mouth to offer comfort. "It's okay. It was a long time ago."  
  
"And his brother?"  
  
She blushes. "Yeah. Lee and I..." It's hard to say out loud even after all they've been through. "We were connected from the moment we met. I've never loved anybody like I loved him." Somehow it's this admission that makes tears rise up in her throat. She’s just one of his pilots now. "After Zak died, I went to serve on their father's ship, the Galactica. That's where I met Sharon." She's saddened by the memory. “Cavil had wiped her memories, too, I guess. She thought she was human." Kara thinks of Athena in her cell, calling Kara her big sister. "There was a time when we were close, before we knew she was a Cylon."  
  
"Everyone always loved her," Daniel offers softly.  
  
Kara studies him for a moment. "Yeah. My friend Helo—he had a baby with one of them. Sharon said it was because they loved each other that they could. Like you and...my mother."  
  
Daniel grins suddenly. "Yes. I asked Sharon once, back in the early days, what it was like to have a baby. I'd seen her pregnant, in the stream, as vividly as I ever saw her awake. She was shocked by the question. Leoben had to drag me away."  
  
Kara winces at the weirdness of it. "Yeah."  
  
"How is her child?"  
  
Kara shakes her head. "She's been through a lot, but she's okay, now. Back with her parents."  
  
"Cavil wanted her?" Daniel asks sharply.  
  
She shrugs. "The Cylons did."  
  
His face creases in worry but he doesn't reply.  
  
"I was on Galactica when the Cylons attacked again, about three years ago. They nuked all the planets at once; we got away with a few dozen ships full of survivors." She sees Daniel close his eyes in pain at the news. "They chased us for nearly a year, while we tried to get away and tried to find enough food and fuel to keep ourselves going. We found Kobol and thought--we were trying to find Earth." It's like physical pain, realizing that was all for nothing. "Eventually we found a habitable planet where we thought we could hide and rebuild. We made it a year before they found us again. I got married down there, to a man named Sam." She sees her father smile but only feels sadness at the memory of that day. "But then..." Kara trails off with a shiver. She has spent so much time trying not to remember this part.  
  
"I had met Leoben right after the attacks. I tortured him, because we needed to know what he knew. When the Cylons got to New Caprica he locked me up in this...house..." Her fingers twist together. "He kept saying he knew I was going to love him, that he'd seen it. But he was wrong."  
  
Daniel's eyes are intense on her. "Did he know what you were?"  
  
She shrugs. "I didn't know, how could he? The Cylons didn't even believe they could reproduce successfully, like you said. They tried all sorts of...things. Trying to make babies. But even Sharon had said that I…that I had a destiny." She suppresses another shiver. "It was was four months before Galactica and Pegasus came back to New Caprica and rescued us. Ever since then, it's been just more running. And trying to get over it. Lee..." Another thing she's never tried to put into words. "Lee helped me get better. We've always been closer to each other than anybody. But we couldn't--it's never worked out." She meets his eyes firmly, adamantly, as anxiety makes her heart race. "But he was flying behind me when I went into the storm. If he thinks I'm gone--he's tried to kill himself before. I have to get back to him now, before he--"  
  
"You flew into it?" her father cuts her off.  
  
Kara nods slowly. It's not something she knows how to explain. "When we reached that planet, when I first saw the storm...I'm not even sure...I started to see things. Myself, as a child. Glimpses of a raider, hidden in the clouds, leading me down into the storm. Was that you?" she asks with sudden urgency.  
  
Daniel shakes his head. "No. I was waiting on the other side of the wormhole."  
  
"Then..." She looks at him warily. "I saw Leoben, like a vision. Telling me I couldn't fight my destiny. That I shouldn't be afraid of death. He showed me Mama, when she died. It was like I was really there." Kara looks down, remembering with a sudden rush Lee's voice screaming for her to come back. "It wasn't even that I wanted to die, but I knew I had to do it. And I was okay with that. I had let everything go. Even him." She shakes her head, unsure even now exactly why she did it.  
  
"The stream reaches each us in different ways."  
  
Kara rolls her eyes. "More Cylon destiny crap."  
  
Her father gives her a look.  
  
She sighs. "So..." she begins. "I must have blacked out, and you found me after I came through the wormhole and put me in the tub to heal me? Like Ellen did with you after Cavil's attack?"  
  
Daniel stares at her, horrified. "When you were a little girl," he swallows hard, "before I left. I took a sample of your DNA."  
  
Kara's eyes widen.  
  
"Your viper came through the clouds already splintering into pieces. It crashed on Earth. I was just hoping you'd be able to download, praying the whole time. And it worked."  
  
Her breathing is suddenly very shallow. "I died."  
  
He hesitates, then nods. "Yes."  
  
Kara looks down at her hands: backs, fronts. Wonders what she'd see on an x-ray. She twists her arms. No trace of her tattoos remains. "Gods," she whispers fearfully. She tries not to tremble, shakes it off. She can deal with this later.  
  
"That doesn't matter right now," she insists, to him, to herself. "The wormhole works the other way, right? We need to just go back!" She imagines for a moment what it would be like to watch Lee's Viper explode and feels sick.  
  
"Kara." Daniel stands, looking down at her.  
  
"What?" Kara breathes.  
  
"Think about it," he says insistently. "It's been more than a day since they lost you. If they believed you about seeing enemy ships, they'll be long gone by now."  
  
"They believed me," Kara snaps at the question in his voice. "Adama--" She winces at the words. "He's like a father to me. But he wouldn't--"  _He wouldn't leave without me_ , she almost says, but that's not exactly true. If Lee saw her die, if there were no more hope, then Daniel's right. The fleet would leave. "There has to be a way to find them."  
  
He's frowning down at her.  
  
"What?" she demands, standing to face him.  
  
Daniel shakes his head. "I don't know what your destiny is from now on. I haven't seen further ahead than this in the stream."  
  
"Gods, forget your frakking stream!" Kara shouts, crossing her arms. "Show me how to fly this thing and we'll find the fleet."  
  
Her father purses his lips and doesn’t answer, just looks at her with a mix of love and pity.  
  
"So you just brought me here to--what, keep you and your little tribe company?" Her hands are in fists now, eager for something to hit. There's no way she could have finally found a planet just in time to never find the fleet again.  
  
He shrugs. “You’re meant to be here.” His calm suddenly grates on her nerves.  
  
"Frak this." Kara spins and leaves the galley, strides through the tangle of corridors. She slows when she realizes Daniel's not following her. After a few minutes she spies the hatch from earlier, a mandala painted on the back. She traces her fingers over the ripples. Blue and yellow and red. Then she opens it and heads out into the night.  
  
*  
  
It's cold out on the planet's surface, but not as cold as Kara is stubborn, and she and Helo camped in worse than this back on Caprica. She makes it quickly to the edge of the field where they landed and peeks between the trees into the forest. She doesn't know what's in there; it's a strange world, after all. Then a bubble of hysteria fills her. Her father can always just grow her a new body if she gets eaten. Kara slumps down against a tree, gasping for breath as the sobs start to come.  
  
She's a Cylon.  
  
Just like Athena, just like Boomer, just like Leoben. More like Hera, maybe, but it hardly matters. She, Starbuck, is the enemy. There's a horrible irony to it, that she's been fighting herself this whole time.  
  
Her father is a Cylon.  
  
Gods she wishes she were really Adama's daughter. She'd even take being Lee's sister if this could just not be true. A sob turns into a bark of laughter.  
  
Lee...she shot him. Was it something inside her that made her do it? Was it really an accident?  
  
After all her aspersions on Helo's love for Athena, was hers ever real?  
  
Kara presses her hands over her eyes as the tears fall. She tries to summon the memory of Lee's arms around her, of his laughter in her ear as he flew beside her. It feels so distant.  
  
A day ago, however long ago, she made a choice. There was an instant where she took her hand off the throttle, stopped trying to fight the pull of gravity or destiny or whatever was calling her. She’s tried to put it out of her mind, but now she can’t. Lee was screaming out to her and she let go. Tears threaten again. She’s hurt people who loved her so many times, and now this: the worst betrayal, and she never even chose it.  
  
She stays there, raging through her tears, as the night grows dark around her. And then, just as exhaustion is becoming more powerful than the cold, Kara wipes her hands on the edge of her shirt and looks up. Her breath fades away into silence. There above her is the answer, waiting in peace for her to see it. No matter what Daniel knows about Earth, or the thirteenth tribe for that matter, these are the stars the Gods showed her on Kobol.  
  
Awe transforms her face. All the loneliness and pain that have driven her since Lee turned her away, since New Caprica, since Zak died and even before - she can accept it all, finally, because it’s brought her to this moment.  
  
"Lords of Kobol, hear my prayer," Kara says, with the same whispered reverence that took her over the last time she saw this sight. "Thank you. Just let me show this to them. Just let me find them. Please."  
  
The night answers her. All around her Kara can hear the sounds of insects and night birds now that her tears have stopped. Sounds of life.  
  
She curls up on her bed of pine needles, unafraid, and sleeps.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

A stick snaps and Kara jerks awake, gasping for a moment before she recognizes Daniel settling himself beside her on the grass.  
  
"Do you remember the first time you ran away?" he asks with a smile. "You were four, I think. I was flying in from a gig on Aerilon and your mother had told you you couldn't come to the spaceport with her to pick me up. She left you with a babysitter. And we got this frantic call just as I landed that she couldn't find you. We raced home, and just as we turned off the highway onto Colonial Boulevard, there you were, running toward us as fast as you could go. More than two miles from home."  
  
Kara's brow furrows. "I don't remember leaving the house, but some of it...I remember you spinning me around and around by the side of the road. It must have been then."  
  
"Yes." He smiles, reaching out to stroke some pine needles out of her hair. "I wanted to tell you, I'll try, Kara. I'll see if I can find them in the stream."  
  
She nods, but things aren't so dire today. This is where the Gods have always been sending them.  
  
"I remember what it was like to say goodbye to my family." Daniel stares into the distance.  
  
Kara sits up and reaches out to touch his hand. For a moment the field vanishes, is replaced by swirling images. She jerks back, shocked. "What was that?"  
  
Daniel narrows his eyes, looking at her carefully. "Give me your hand."  
  
She reaches out tentatively, hesitates before resting her palm on his.  
  
The images resolve and it's like they're suddenly in another place. Standing inside a ship, inside the one that a moment ago was beside them.  _Goodbye_ , a woman whispers softly, and Kara turns in horror as she recognizes the voice. There beside her is Ellen Tigh.  
  
She hurtles away and finds herself gasping, several feet from her father, who is looking at her in sudden concern. "What was that?" Kara pants.  
  
He resettles himself. "The Cylons use something called projection to see the world. Our optic nerves are on some level just like humans', but they can also be stimulated vividly by what we choose to imagine. I was remembering, seeing, the last time I saw my mother."  
  
"Ellen." She’s paralyzed by it for a moment. "Ellen Tigh is a Cylon. Gods. And Tigh..." She shakes her head. How can it be the Cylons still have new horrible secrets?  
  
"Who is Ellen Tigh?" Daniel's eyebrows have narrowed as he tries to understand Kara's panic.  
  
She shakes her head, then reaches out. "Will this work the other way?"  
  
He shrugs. "I don't know." He moves toward her, takes her hand.  
  
Kara takes a moment, searching for something she remembers vividly. Then she grins.  
  
 _They are on a beach of sorts, sunlight warm on their hair as they sit at a makeshift bar.  
  
I've always wanted to date a ball player, Ellen says beside her. But I guess he's kind of taken.  
  
Kara tries not to roll her eyes. Kind of. She looks past Ellen to Tigh, to Sam._  
  
"Kara!"  
  
She is jostled out of the memory to find Daniel grinning foolishly, throwing his arms around her.  
  
"You found them!"  
  
She pats him on the back, trying to calm his unexpected outburst. "What? Found who?"  
  
He sits back on his heels. "When John hid them from me, from the stream--he said he wanted them to suffer. It must be why he's chasing your fleet, because they're still among you."  
  
"They?" The planet starts to turn too fast beneath her.  
  
"The older man, that was Saul. He and Ellen were a couple among the five, as well. They were two of my parents."  
  
She should be shocked, but all that comes out of Kara's mouth is laughter. She laughs and laughs, toppling over onto the grass. Tigh is her grandfather. She can’t wait to tell him.  
She finally sobers, tempered by another thought. "Then where is Ellen now?"  
  
Daniel frowns in confusion.  
  
"She died. Tigh--Saul--" her face tenses at the memory of his pain and in sudden disgust. "They found out she was sleeping with Cavil on New Caprica, giving him information about the resistance. They killed her."  
  
Her father turns his face away. "John," he spits out, sickened. "He must have her now. Again."  
  
She nods, waits for him to finish processing.  
  
Finally he turns back to her, his smile grimmer but returning. "But the others are still among you? Saul and Sam?"  
  
Kara clutches fistfuls of grass as the world spins. “No,” she pleads in a whisper.  
  
"They died too?"  
  
She closes her eyes. "That man in my memory, my Sam. That was my husband." She rips out a handful of grass and smashes her fist back down against the ground. "Frak!" Kara protests. She blinks back more tears. She has no patience for them now. Giving herself a hard shake, she turns back to her father. He's staring at her in sympathy.  
  
"They believe they are human," Daniel says softly. "They only know themselves as whatever John made them think they were."  
  
She shrugs, unable to deal with it. "Whatever. Show me the other two, now. I need to know."  
  
He watches her another moment, then reaches out.  
  
As Kara's eyes close again she sees them arrayed before her, on the day he was first born: Ellen and Saul, John and Leoben, Sarah and D'Anna, Doral and Simon, Sharon and Sam. And beyond him, in the ring of the family, Tyrol and Tory.  
  
Her breath rushes out, one last shock. But after Saul and Sam, even the chief can't overwhelm her.  
  
"Fine," Kara manages. "Fine. All the more reason we need to go back. We have to..." She trails off. What, tell them what they are? How could she ever tell the old man that Tigh was a Cylon? Or that she was herself? She looks up at Daniel, sees the longing in his eyes, and knows what he, at least, needs to hear. "We have to find both our families."  
  
"Alright," he promises. "We will."  
  
*  
  
They head back into the ship, Daniel’s arm around his daughter’s shoulders to keep her warm in the chill morning air. As they pass through the hatch Kara pulls away, looking more closely at the murals that mark the walls. In one there’s a Centurion planting a tree, gazing at it with love. She shakes her head. If this was something he saw in the stream, maybe he never understood it at all.  
  
“They’ll search a long time,” her father says softly, “but they’ll find their world.”  
  
Kara blinks at him in wonder. Maybe she still doesn’t understand.  
  
Along the rest of the hall she finds herself again and again, pale renderings of a child shape, a halo of golden hair, wandering through mandalas and among a family of Cylons. “I used to be a painter,” she murmurs to her father.  
  
“I know.”  
  
He sounds so proud that Kara turns, tears rushing into her eyes. Daniel smiles at her like he loves her, like he’s her father. It’s too much; she looks away.  
  
There’s a bathroom across from the kitchen, and while Kara showers Daniel makes breakfast. As they eat they both savor the new silence that rests between them. When she was seven years old, they’d do this some mornings, when Socrata had been drinking heavily the night before and they could still hear her snoring in the bedroom. They’d go for a morning walk, and then Dreilide would make them waffles or pancakes or French toast and they’d eat without speaking, only smiles and glances and an occasional burst of whistled notes to tell each other that the world was perfect for a few minutes.  
  
This morning there’s toast with honey. It quiets Kara’s turmoil for a little while.  
  
“Does the stream show you how this will all end?” she asks as her father chews his last bite of the rich brown bread.  
  
He swallows and meets her eyes. “It’s not like that. You don’t get to ask your own questions, not in literal words. It’s about being open, and seeing.”  
  
Kara nods, thinking. “Could I see it?”  
  
Daniel blinks, then pushes their dishes to the side and rests his hands, palms up, in the center of the table. “We can try.”  
  
Her shoulders shudder at the strangeness of this, but Kara reaches out and lays her hands in his. Her father’s hands are strong and warm, holding onto her. She wonders if his fingers remember how to play the piano, and even as the thought drifts through her mind, he starts to hum, his fingertips pulsing against her wrists as if he’s playing unconsciously. The music raises the hairs on the back of Kara’s neck as it flows out of him and into the air, staining the edges of her vision as if a storm is rising around them.  
  
“What are you singing?” Kara gasps, her voice resonating more than it should in the small room.  
  
“My father's song.” He answers her, but the music doesn’t stop.  
  
 _Sam's_. It's oddly comforting, even if the familial relationships are something she's glad aren't genetic. She's no stranger to borderline incest, but she really doesn't want to think about it.  
  
“Close your eyes.”  
  
Kara looks at him for one more second before she obeys. They used to play this together on the piano. She trusts him. She closes her eyes.  
  
It's a bit like waiting for the oracle to speak, knowing there are mysteries you're just not part of. And then suddenly, with a sort of surge, Kara is seeing things, flashes of images slipping away from her before she can catch them:  _The maelstrom again, swirling around them, crackling with energy. The old man's wooden ship, broken into pieces. A Viper slinging through the clouds of a nebula. A comet streaking across the rings of a gas giant. A bonfire. Lee's face the night they met, full of awe and joy as he held out a bouquet of flowers._  
  
She pulls her hands back, her eyes wide, as recognition shudders through her.  
  
“Kara?”  
  
“You showed me that, once. When I was a little girl. Just that.”  
  
Daniel’s eyebrows flare in surprise. “The night I left. You were sleeping and I thought you might not see, but—I wanted to make sure you knew about the storm. I didn't think you'd remember. What's wrong?”  
  
“That was Lee.” Gods, he was so young then. She’d almost forgotten his beauty, his earnestness, back before they lost everything.  
  
“You don't believe in destiny.” There's a hint of a tease in his voice and she snorts softly.  
  
“I don't like the idea that we don't get to make choices.”  
  
“Would you choose him?”  
  
Kara sighs, the answer twisting through her, certainty shaded with longing and regret. She misses him with a visceral ache. “What does the rest of it mean?”  
  
“What does it mean to you?”  
  
“Well, the storm we've already seen. And Lee. And the model ship is on Galactica. The rest I don't know.”  
  
Daniel nods. “I've seen that nebula before. It's not even that far from the gas giant where the storm was. But it didn't feel—” He frowns. “It's hard to explain. It didn't feel like something about to happen feels. Not like the storm suddenly felt when it was time to go find you.”  
  
“We'll have to keep checking,” Kara says simply. She looks at her arms thoughtfully, slipping into CAG mode. “There are a few other things we'll need to do first, anyway.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“If I show up there, like this, saying I'm half Cylon--it won't matter if Lee and Adama believe me, I'll be airlocked on the spot. They have to believe I'm  _me_.”  
  
“You are you,” he points out. “Your body has the same DNA, the same blood type--there's no way they could tell the difference.”  
  
She looks at her hands. “X-rays. But new breaks would look different than old ones, so it can't be helped.”  
  
“Old ones?” His voice is tight.  
  
Kara shakes her head, looking down.  
  
“Kara.” He grabs her knee to make her look at him.  
  
She doesn't want to hurt him. Somehow in the space of a day he's become her father again. She gets it over quickly. “I played a trick on her. She slammed my hands in a door.”  
  
Daniel recoils and she realizes suddenly that he shared her memory. Her glee at Socrata jumping around, then the sudden terror as her mother wrenched her toward the door. Then the pain. Kara purses her lips. “Anyway, we can't change that. You'll have to give me my tattoos again, though. And scars.”  
  
He starts to object but Kara cuts him off. “We have to. Believe me, I'd go through worse for these people. I already have. I’m going to bring them home.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

A vision overtakes Daniel as he stands on the shore of one of this world’s great oceans, watching Kara racing through the surf the way she did as a child on Aquaria. Perhaps Leoben was right about water being a catalyst; at any rate, as the salty tide rushes around Daniel’s feet, he’s suddenly on another world, ankle-deep in another ocean, standing on sharp rocks instead of fine sand.  
  
 _There are snatches of their faces around him: Saul and Leoben, Galen and D’Anna. His sister’s face is twisted in grief at the devastation before them. In the distance Daniel sees ruins, and he knows where they are. “What am I?” Kara screams, and he whirls, the scene spiraling into night, into smoke and darkness._  
  
“Dad?” Kara asks, and then he’s back. She’s standing before him, dripping wet, frowning in concern. “What is it, what did you see?”  
  
He shakes his head. “I saw—you’ll take them to Earth.”  
  
“But you said it was dead.”  
  
Daniel shrugs. “It’s their destiny, it’s their journey. They’ll reach it.”  
  
“No, we’re bringing them  _here_ ,” she insists. She gets her stubbornness from her mother. “They need a place where they can live again.”  
  
Gazing across the ocean toward the horizon, he doesn’t bother to correct her. Another vision has been haunting his dreams every night, keeping him awake and wandering at all hours: a vision of his oldest brother studying the genetic code of Sharon’s daughter, determined to dissect her and replicate her and bring her generation under his control as he has their parents’. There’s only one reason Kara would have to cry out like that on the dead world, only one reason from this day forward that she wouldn’t know exactly who and what she is. Daniel’s chest aches, but he recognizes the glimpse of his own destiny. This will be his doing.  
  
“Dad?”  
  
Her face is lined with worry, and Daniel forces his own expression to soften. “Don’t worry, you’ll be their guide.” He nods back toward the ship, which they’ve spend the week flying across the surface of the planet, scouting for the materials they need to build a Viper and keeping an eye out for settlement sites. Kara is single-minded in her purpose, and he’s enjoyed the chance to see her in her element. “We should get back to work,” he says, and she nods.  
  
*  
  
Kara winces as she sets down the soldering iron, fighting the urge to rub a hand over sore skin. She’s marked again with the stains of her various rebellions: the old Gemenese words for ‘public property’ on the inside of her elbow, a protest against her mother’s sense of ownership; a mechanical wing on her other arm, marrying her to Sam. They’ve both taken on new meaning in the past days, as her father held his breath and stroked the needle across her flesh. She’s not the same girl who chose them, and might not have chosen them again if circumstances were different. That first time Lee saw her, from a distance on New Caprica, after she got the tattoo—she still flinches at the memory.  
  
Her fingers stroke over the raised skin, pressing down to draw out the ache. It’s for him this time: to bring him here, to bring them all here. He’s married, and so is she, and the very best she can do is give them all a chance to live with sun on their faces and clean air in their lungs.  
  
The Viper has taken nearly a month to finish, but all it needs now is a coat of paint and a tail number. They won’t understand where she’s come from or why her ship is intact, but the Gods have mysterious ways, and they’ve all seen more than a few miracles. Back in the first days of the war, she prayed for Lee’s soul and only hours later he was standing before her. Kara wonders if they’ve had a funeral, wonders if Lee spoke, or cried. More likely he and Sam got into a fight. Her eyes burn at the thought of Lee having to hang her picture in the Memorial Hall, having to stand in that place where she put up Kat’s picture, where he comforted her over yet another loss and then kissed her like he couldn’t believe they’d both survived the day.  
  
A shudder ripples through her. For weeks she’s put off the one question that haunts her every time she thinks of Lee or Sam: what if her father hadn’t found her? What if she were never coming back? Her visions of Leoben, of her mother, have faded into the merest dreams. The taste of fear is sharp on her tongue and she smacks her hand against the side of the Viper, reminding herself that she’s here. Trying not to think of how close she was to gone.  
  
Kara takes deep breaths, calming her nerves, carefully paints on her old tail number. That ship saw her through danger more times than any other—she’d get its name tattooed on her body sooner than half the men she’s loved.  
  
“Almost ready?” Daniel asks behind her.  
  
“Getting there,” Kara sighs, shrugging her shoulders to release the day’s tension. “It’ll pass inspection at first glance, but it’s obviously new. As long as they let me on board, though, I can do the rest. The old man just needs to listen to me, and he will.”  
  
“He loves you.”  
  
She peers at him, trying to discern all the emotions in her father’s face: regret, jealousy, relief. “Yeah,” Kara answers, glancing away. “We’re family.” She gathers up her tools, avoiding Daniel’s eyes. The Old Man got over Boomer being a Cylon, and adores Hera as if she were his granddaughter, but Kara knows better than to doubt Adama’s rage, or his mercilessness in the face of betrayal. She has no idea what her return will mean.  
  
*  
  
Kara’s been with him for nearly two months when Daniel wakes in the dark to the knowledge that it’s time. The human fleet is nearing the nebula. Against the backs of his eyes, stars prickle and shiver, obscured by the clouded color of the formation and ships he recognizes all too well. John is there, waiting. Daniel reaches out in the dark, trying to see further, and with a wracking heave he can feel his brother’s mind. John is darker than before, his entire being twisted inward away from the stream. He’s consumed by hunger for power, by a seething jealous anger. By an unyielding hatred for humanity and a determination to seize Sharon’s child.  
  
He wakes again, the beams of the ceiling clear now in the dimness. Daniel dresses quickly and heads through the ship to the dusty control room near his resurrection tank. He used this years ago, when he was trying to program new ideas into his creatures. It uses older technology, for writing and rewriting new skill sets. For the last few weeks he’s been mulling over how John must have used something like this to make their parents sleepers, their original memories suppressed. The problem has been processing in the back of his mind, and now the answer seems obvious. Daniel wipes the machines off and sets to work.  
  
“Dad?” Kara calls hours later.  
  
His heart clenches at the sound. “Here!” he shouts back, and she appears in the doorway. She’s avoided this part of the ship, with its Cylon technology, with the resurrection tank she still won’t look at.  
  
“What is this?” she asks, gesturing to the tangle of wires before him.  
  
“The last step,” he says carefully. “It’s time for you to go back.”  
  
Kara’s eyes light up in anticipation and eagerness. “You saw it?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
She nods, circling the chair-like apparatus in the center of the room. “What does it do?”  
  
Daniel swallows back the truth and smiles. “It’s what allows me to transport your ship back into space near the Galactica.”  
  
“But I need to be  _in_  the Viper,” Kara argues.  
  
“This will let me lock on to your signature,” he promises quickly. “I just need to scan you. Come here, lie back.”  
  
She does it without complaint. She trusts him. Daniel looks away. If this weren’t the only way to save her life—but it is. As Kara lies back, he gazes down at her. “I love you,” he says softly. “I always have.”  
  
Kara nods. “I love you, too.” A tear streaks back from the corner of her eye, finding its way along her temple, and Daniel flicks the machine on. His daughter’s eyes snap shut, her body spasming for a moment that seems to last forever before going limp. She’ll remember nothing more of the last weeks than their flights over the planet. He has to give her some bit of hope to hold onto.  
  
Daniel presses a kiss to her cheek and lifts her in his arms. All that’s left is to set her in her Viper and release her into space. She’ll find her way back to him, someday. He can’t see when, or what she’ll survive in the meantime, but he knows, as he’s always known, that there’s no need for goodbye.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**

Daniel never knew how lonely he was before. Now silence is heavy in the air around him, the walls muffling his muttered words with warped echoes. He goes out among his people and finds they’ve nearly forgotten him in his short absence since Kara arrived. A new character has emerged in their stories: a man whose skin shines like light, a man who can fly up in the sky and command crops and speak in tongues they don’t understand.  
  
A smile crosses his lips as he listens. Kara would be both amused and appalled that he’s become the image of the One True God for these folk. His heart aches at the thought of her.  
  
It’s difficult to tell his own anxiety from the pressure of the stream in his mind, but finally, after several months have passed, Daniel wakes knowing it’s time to take the next step. He watches out the window as his ship lifts off and sees children shrieking and chasing after him, their elders kneeling in awe.  
  
When he steps out of the ship again on the scorched earth of his parents’ home, it’s never seemed more important to protect his children from this. Except that his first child is here too, her body burned and mangled. Daniel sits beside her for two long days, memorizing the healed fractures that mottle her bones, the artifacts of her identity that still hang over her heart. He’s never fought his destiny for more than a moment, but as he strokes the rough, ruined metal of Kara’s ship Daniel rages inside at how brutally it’s treated his daughter. He turns on the beacon in an instant impulse, then stares at his own hands, wondering what it is that guides him: God? A God? Some glitch in his programming?  
  
Ships streak through the atmosphere. Human and Cylon together, neither shooting at the other, and Daniel stares up at them, grinning even as tears streak down his cheeks. Watching from afar he sees them land, sees several of his parents and his siblings standing among humans on the shore. Not all: Cavil’s rage tingles in the back of his mind. They’re still being chased. He’s indescribably sad; it means he can’t bring them to his world yet. And yet he knows they’ll walk those sands, too.  
  
Kara turns away, Leoben trailing her. Daniel wants to laugh, to hug his brother close to him. Instead he follows.  
  
What comes next haunts his dreams for years. His daughter, his little girl who once sat in his lap as he played for her, finds her own body. Even Leoben runs away, and Daniel flings silent curses after him. In the darkness Daniel watches as she builds a pyre, a monument to something she doesn’t understand. He’d give anything to go to her, to hold her, to explain all the secrets. But he’s a stranger, and telling her would only break her heart again.  
  
The fleet jumps away, and he can’t help but follow. Sinking into the stream brings some peace: he can feel Kara now in her aching confusion, but he can feel her future, too. She will know such joy.  
  
*  
  
She’s stopped ranting about it to whoever will listen, refuses to describe it when Leoben asks, but Kara still has the dreams at night. She’s as sure as she’s ever been that she flew over a bright planet, blue and green and richly alive. The others look at her like she’s crazy or avoid her altogether. She disappeared and came back and led them to a dead piece of rock; none of those are forgivable offenses. If she were in their place, she’d even agree—better to lose one person but keep hoping for Earth than to be like this, adrift, still at war and with no end to either in sight.  
  
By day she goes through the motions of being CAG to pilots who no longer entirely trust her and at night she slips away to hold Sam’s hand. Somehow she thinks he can feel it when she’s remembering finding her body, when she’s remembering how much happiness they shared in the early days together. Cottle says Sam probably can’t even hear her, but still she tries to remember the good times.  
  
That corpse, that pyre on the beach—they’re both so impossible that she can put them out of her mind for hours or days at a time, until some smell from the mess hall reminds her of her own burning flesh and she bolts for the head, retching.  
  
Even real ambrosia, when she can get it, won’t make the dream go away. Kara gets glimpses of waves crashing over a shore or stars shining overhead just like on Kobol, and it’s the worst kind of ache to wake up and remember, because Galactica isn’t a place with hope anymore.  
  
*  
  
It’s almost time. Each day Daniel wakes with pressure building inside him—and the knowledge that Kara needs him. On impulse he slips into the fleet and transports himself on board the Galactica.  
  
He finds himself in the middle of a hallway, the walls covered with pictures and letters, burned-out candles littering the floor. With a sharp breath of relief Daniel sees he’s alone.  
  
The hatch at one end of the corridor opens with a clang and a man steps through, a man Daniel has known since Kara was a little girl.  
  
Daniel watches as he stops halfway down the hall, his fingers hovering over one photograph in an unconscious caress. Then the man glances toward him, his eyes glassy with tears. “Who did you lose?” he asks softly.  
  
Daniel opens his mouth, unsure how to answer. “My daughter,” he finally says. The words feel right after his long days with Kara’s body. His daughter, who grew up to be that woman, is lost to him no matter what the future brings.  
  
Lee Adama nods toward the picture. “My wife.”  
  
A wave of fear crashes over Daniel.  
  
“My ex-wife,” Lee adds quietly.  
  
The fear recedes. Daniel holds out his hand on an impulse, and Lee clasps it. When they let go, Lee nods and leaves.  
  
Daniel proceeds further into the ship. It smells familiarly of the Colony, though he isn’t sure why. He passes his father Galen and a grin washes his face, but he stays silent.  
  
And then he stops short at the sound of music.  
  
Somewhere his own music is playing, not in his head, not in the stream, but with the tinny resonance of a recording. Daniel races through corridors that suddenly seem to twist and turn around him until he stumbles to a halt inside the door of the sick bay. There are people everywhere, human and Cylon both, but no one notices him as he slips past the curtains. Then he’s there, standing just a few feet from his daughter where she’s leaning over Sam’s body.  
  
Daniel could cry at the sight: Sam’s head is wrapped in bandages and he’s sickly and pale, nothing like the laughing, charming man he remembers. And yet he can feel his father all around him, the music strengthening his spirit, wakening his mind to all the truth that has been suppressed for so long.  
  
Kara leans forward, resting her forehead against Sam’s hand, clasped in her own. Her shoulders are locked, tension keeping her from falling apart, but somehow he thinks he can hear her crying like a child. She starts to turn and Daniel slips away.  
  
*  
  
The sheer scope of the Galactica amazes him after so many years alone on his own small ship. There are miles of corridors, hundreds of bunks and storerooms, thousands of people. They jostle past as if Daniel is invisible. A small girl with dark curly hair runs by, narrowly avoiding his knees, and Daniel turns in an instant of panic before her mother chases after her with a mumbled excuse me. He stares after his sister with tears filling his eyes, his hand still outstretched to call her back. She doesn’t know him, but one day she will.  
  
They’ve even built a bar, he can smell it a mile away. It’s been decades since he had a good whiskey and it burns as he knocks it back. In the mirror behind the counter - a polished section of what was once a tylium drum - Daniel catches sight of a piano.  
  
He spends a whole day tuning it, and until Kara appears he doesn’t realize he’s been waiting for her. But then he starts, letting his fingers slip over the keys in patterns so often repeated that they come without a thought. He tells her story back to her, in bits and pieces, stanzas and refrains, all the things he can’t tell her in words. Eventually she joins him, and her eyes are wary and her words are bitter but she’s beside him, and it’s almost enough.  
  
He’s never known her like this before; back on his ship she was so guarded, keeping secrets at first for the sake of the secrets and later for his sake instead. She still holds back now but when she lashes out with her words in anger and despair, Daniel can feel how true they are for her. Again he burns with rage at the universe.  
  
A few nights pass before Kara shows him what Sharon’s daughter has made: a series of dots, of notes, a pattern buried deep in her heritage. The child sensed somehow that it was for Kara, that the song in their hearts is the same. Daniel’s not sure whether to cry or laugh, but he wishes Sam were himself again, could remember and understand that his gift will be part of all their descendants. He plays for Kara, her hands beside his the way they first played together when she was a child. Their shoulders brush as he remembers and he’s sure she can see some part of his projection from the way she turns to him in surprise. He doesn’t bother to hide it; he lets her feel the intensity of the love and regret flowing through him.  
  
The notes play out into silence, into release. Kara’s breathing seems to come more easily than it has in days. Around him emotions swell: his parents have recognized the music, perhaps even him. With a rush of adrenaline he feels Ellen’s alarm.  
  
As the last notes ring out, Daniel projects a farewell into Kara’s mind and transports himself back to his ship. It’s empty and cold there, but newly peaceful. He’ll see them all again soon.  
  
*  
  
Kara can’t remember now if the music was always part of her dreams or not. Perhaps it was just too soft before; now it seems indistinguishable from the planet, from the joy she feels flying over it and watching the bright swirls of rivers and streams. Kara no longer questions her dreams. There’s no reason to believe that place is any more than a figment of her imagination, inspired by longing and a thousand legends. But she needs it to be real, and there’s a kind of release in belief that lets her go on.  
  
As they prepare to rescue Hera, the little girl who gave her the music, Kara can feel the rightness of it. Lee is by her side, planning the mission, sharing in the dream because he believes in her the way she believes recklessly, completely that there’s reason to hope again.  
  
In the final moments of the war, an answer occurs to Kara that seems startling only because she’s never thought of it before, and because she knows at once that she’s right. When she was four years old, the universe told her where home would be, and she raised her hands to her father’s piano to tell him, too. Kara keys in the notes, music swirling in her mind as if she’s playing a piano and not a keyboard.  
  
The universe reforms itself around them, flooding through her mind in the instant of the jump, and as the ship shudders and groans to a halt, Kara smiles in pure relief.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

There’s never been anything more beautiful than the planet spread out below them as Athena eases the Raptor through the clouds and Helo turns to hug Kara as hard as he can. She hugs him back, looking past him to Lee, whose eyes are shining as he takes in the view. Kara could laugh or sing - she wants to paint this moment, to live in it forever.  
  
Yet the first breath of air fills her with icy dread, the weight of destiny creeping up her spine. Kara whirls, looking for an enemy, for some last trick. Recognition churns through her, but she doesn’t understand. Her beacon led them to that other Earth, there’s no reason she should know this one. She closes her eyes tightly. This has to be the ending.  
  
“Kara,” Lee whispers, and she feels him take her hand. She opens her eyes gingerly. “Come on,” he murmurs, and leads her out of the ship.  
  
She can almost feel his joy. As they begin to explore, it rises in Kara, too. If she’s had a destiny this whole time, it was a good one. They’re here. She lets the feeling carry her through the next two days, as she says her goodbyes to Sam, as she leaves her home on Galactica for the last time. Lee Adama believes that they’ve found some kind of bright shiny future, and Kara has always believed in him. Still, the nagging sense of foreboding doesn’t go away. She doesn’t want to be a harbinger of anything. But she doesn’t quite believe that she’s not.  
  
Even watching Adama and Laura fly off into the distance can’t dampen Lee’s spirits entirely. Kara aches as she walks with him across the grassy hills of their new world. She wasn’t wrong when they landed; there’s something that’s still coming. It’s calling her now, memories stirring in her mind. This time is over, and as she watches him stare out at their new world, Kara wants to cry, but he’s happy and she isn’t afraid.  
  
*  
  
Kara opens her eyes and gasps as knowledge floods through her, layers of memories integrating themselves over and around everything she’s lived through for the last months. She whirls to find Daniel standing at the transporter controls, grinning at her proudly.  
  
She opens her mouth to shout but can’t come up with words. If anything had happened but what’s happened—as knowledge rushes back in a wave it’s too hard to imagine another future. So many people might be alive still, even the Galactica unbroken. Or they could all be dead.  
  
“You did it,” her father says, and he’s still smiling at her, and Kara could cry.  
  
“What happens now?” she asks. She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Come back with me. There are so many people who’ve landed from across the fleet no one would know the difference if you appeared—I could even say you were my long lost father and they’d probably believe it.” Excitement rises in her chest as she turns and sees the resurrection chamber nearby. “We can save Sam!” she says, agitated and hopeful all at once.  
  
Daniel’s eyes fill with sorrow, and he shakes his head slowly. “We don’t have a body for him.”  
  
Kara looks upward, a last wash of grief flowing over her. Her husband will be dead soon. Her father takes her hand, and she can feel it: Sam is in the stream, already washing away, flowing around them like water or music. She closes her eyes and says goodbye again, truer this time because she knows he shares it.  
  
Blinking tears away she meets her father’s eyes. “He said—he said he’d find a perfect world for the end of Kara Thrace. And it was his song that brought us here. But I don’t understand—”  
  
Daniel shrugs. “Maybe it was his destiny,” he offers. “There was a prophecy once about a dying leader who’d lead his people home but never set foot there. From Pythia.”  
  
Kara gives half a laugh. “I know it,” she says, and her heart eases as she feels the ecstasy of the peace Sam’s found.  
  
Her father crosses the room, lifting a control panel away and beginning to take apart the delicate machinery. He looks down at it fondly, the friend of his youth. “If the other Cylons found this place—the temptation might be too great.” After a moment he reaches in, ripping out a handful of wires, rendering them useless. Kara gasps at the waste, on top of everything else, but Daniel shakes his head at her. “We’ll start this new life as equals.”  
  
Kara watches him and a chill comes over her as her memories settle further. She’s a Cylon. “He called me the harbinger of death. Sam. So did the hybrid. Was this what he meant, or—” Loss tightens her chest. “Is the war really over?” She’s been holding this in for weeks, for months, and somehow in her father’s presence all her fear and uncertainty are pouring out.  
  
Daniel stops working and puts his arms around her, presses his lips to her temple. Kara clings to him the way she suddenly remembers doing at four years old, when he stopped twirling her and just held her close. Her father’s breath lifts her hair.  
  
“Thinking too hard about your destiny won’t stop it coming, Kara. And sometimes it’ll stop you from seeing when it’s gotten here.”  
  
“What do you mean?” she demands, pulling back to see him.  
  
He hums softly, a familiar note. “Two races will die here, Kara, wiped out forever. But a third will be born. Is born already, in you and Hera.”  
  
“Lee’s going to die?” Kara whispers, the words lodging in her throat.  
  
“Someday.” Daniel takes her hands in his and the stream flows before them, its eddies and currents running clear as they stand on the shore. Children with her hair and Lee’s eyes dash laughing through a breeze, among others of their new kind, a race mixed of human and Cylon and the people of Daniel’s creation. Kara’s mouth falls open in a silent breath of surprise. Slowly she smiles.  
  
*  
  
 _She's just gone._  
  
Lee sinks down into the grass. He could wait here for an eternity and no one would come for him. Everyone is gone. He rests his forehead against his knees as the tremors come, and then the tears.  
  
The sky overhead is blue, the sun bright. It no longer matters. After some matter of hours, the grass parts and Hera appears. As Lee lifts his head, he sees Helo on the path they’re beginning to wear away along the bottom of the hill. The other man waves cheerfully.  
  
“Who are you waiting for?” Hera asks.  
  
Lee shakes his head. Words have left him.  
  
The child smiles and darts back to her father.  
  
There’s no one left, and he can’t even move. His whole family, all the women he’s loved in his life. Laura once told him how guilty she felt worrying about her personal catastrophe on the day of the apocalypse. Lee can’t quite get his own mind around his catastrophe coming, out of nowhere, on the day that the rest of the world is finally restored. He can’t ruin it for them, can’t fathom moving from this spot. He’s alone in this.  
  
Once he floated through the darkness of space and thought it shared his despair. Only Kara called him back. As night descends, Lee stares up into the starry sky, a view they thought was a promise back on Kobol that has turned into the worst kind of warning. His tears blur the stars into meteors streaking across his vision, or enemy nukes shooting towards him. Lee closes his eyes and lets them come.  
  
*  
  
Daniel packs his things with an aching tenderness, stroking the bulkheads of his little ship, saying a farewell to his home. Kara hangs back, studying the murals that hold all of her history, the colors visceral swirls of emotion and longing. She tries to commit them to memory before they’re gone.  
  
In one scene, she’s a child, her father spinning her in his arms on a street corner; in another she’s shocked to see Lee, standing at her father’s elbow as he cradles a bundle of blankets. Surely that’s new since she was last here? Great swirls of blue and silver and gold wrap from one image to the next, the stream in all its glory. Kara turns away before she sees too much, humming to herself at the thought of the future already on its way.  
  
There’s not much tylium left in the tanks, but it’s enough to get the ship out of orbit, on its path to join Sam and the human fleet: an act any peace treaty would have demanded, made in silence.  
  
Daniel and Kara stand together as it takes off into the darkness, and then she tilts her head toward the human encampment and smiles. “Destiny’s calling.”  
  
*  
  
A breeze is blowing strands of grass or hair across his cheek, and his has gotten long but not that long. Lee’s eyes flutter open and he reaches to brush the hair away, but there’s something weighing down his arm. He turns to see, and his heart stops. It’s the opposite of that morning on New Caprica on the sand. This time she’s here, when he didn’t expect her to be, curled into him.  
  
He doesn’t want to breathe, doesn’t want to risk this being a dream, but somehow she stirs, looks up at him beatifically. The moon sets her hair gleaming, brightens her eyes.  
  
“Kara?” he asks in wonder.  
  
“Yeah,” she says, then her eyes grow worried. “I’m sorry I left. But I’m back now. I’ll explain it all in the morning.”  
  
“You’ll be here in the morning.”  
  
She grins, nodding, love in her eyes that soothes everything aching in his heart. “I will.”  
  
*  
  
It feels like a moment out of time. It always has been. Before he was born, Daniel’s sure there was this: amorphous night on a world of his own creation, surrounded by peace and the music of the heavens. Recognition ebbs and shifts as consciousness expands: to his brothers and sisters, his parents, his child and on to the generations that will come. In time there will be multitudes, and war, and peace. And all of it will happen again.  
  
***  
  
THE END


End file.
